


Civic Participation

by xylodemon



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xylodemon/pseuds/xylodemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos has no real interest in bowling, scientific or otherwise, but a certain amount of civic participation is mandated by city ordinance, and bowling sounds much safer than the Horticulture Club, or the group of nameless and occasionally limbless volunteers who control the alligator population out in the Scrub Lands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Civic Participation

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://nightvalekink.livejournal.com/profile)[**nightvalekink**](http://nightvalekink.livejournal.com/), and the prompt _anything from Carlos' POV, specifically why he had to go find Cecil after his life had been threatened instead of anyone else._ I managed the first part; mileage will vary on the second.
> 
> Spoilers through _One Year Later_. Apache Tracker's Russian dialogue taken from [this transcript](http://aimlessglee.tumblr.com/post/55206782819/welcome-to-night-vale-episode-twenty-five-transcript). I would like to apologize for the lack of tentacles or eldritch horrors.

His fifth week in Night Vale, Carlos joins the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex's Friends 'N' Family Leisure League. He has no real interest in bowling, scientific or otherwise, but a certain amount of civic participation is mandated by city ordinance, and bowling sounds less boring than the Knitting Circle and much safer than the Horticulture Club, or the group of nameless and occasionally limbless volunteers who control the alligator population out in the Scrub Lands. More importantly, he finds the registration form pinned to his front door with the kind of blue switchblade knife popular with the Sheriff's Secret Police, and he doesn't think his nerves can handle another late night visit from cloaked, mysterious strangers.

The Leisure League meets on Thursday nights, after sunset but before the ritual chanting starts in the Taco Bell parking lot; Carlos pays a twenty dollar entrance fee, forks over another nineteen-ninety-five for a shapeless shirt the exact color of creamed peas, and hopes that the last person to wear his rental shoes had understood the finer points of both foot care and overall personal hygiene. 

"You're up," Leanne Hart tells him, licking plasticky nacho cheese from fingers tipped with two-inch acrylic nails filed into sharp points. Carlos had been one of the few potential Leisure Leaguers without a ready-made team of cousins, coworkers, or transdimensional squatters, so Teddy Williams had lumped him in with the rest of the leftovers, a group that included Leanne, one of the mute, wide-eyed children on the City Council payroll, and two of the hooded figures everyone pretends not to see lurking around the dog park. The jury is still out on who unsettles Carlos the most.

The jukebox by the skeeball machines coughs as it switches from one Buddy Holly song to the next, and one of the hooded figures makes a low buzzing noise Carlos can feel behind his teeth. He bowls, with all the surety and grace of someone who hasn't actually bowled since his cousin Veronica's fourteenth birthday party, and his violently orange ball knocks down two pins on his first try and spins straight into the gutter on his second. He fares about the same for the rest of the game; his team loses to the Fuel 'N' Go Fillups by forty-six, and Carlos trudges home under a vibrating indigo sky, determined to focus on something with scientific importance.

He observes the dog park from a covert distance, and he studies the lights above the Arby's through a high-powered telescope, and he shouts dead languages at both the Brownstone Spire and the unexplained pyramid in the Beatrix Lowman Memorial Meditation Zone, and he writes out meticulous notes on every anomaly he expects to find but doesn't, scratching his careful equations into the wall with a broken coat-hanger after all his notepads and pencils disappear. He takes samples of any natural substance he can get his hands on, even managing a bit of blood and hair in the aftermath of the disastrous PTA meeting; he runs them through every single test he can think of, and, when those answers defy both physics and common sense, he looks up a few more tests on the internet for good measure.

He discovers -- between crushing losses against the Dark Owl DJs, the PinkBerry Pints, and the Subway Stuffers, as well as a heartbreaking near-win against a silent, nameless team Carlos suspects are actually librarians -- that the soil is contaminated with both mercury and lead, that the water is so polluted that it almost qualifies as sentient, and that the air over Radon Canyon is so radioactive that it nearly melts the dial on his Geiger counter. He also discovers that the people of Night Vale are scientifically normal, that they are completely and one hundred percent human on a cellular level, that somehow, they have adapted to a life without gas masks or Hazmat suits or reliable access to fresh fruits and vegetables in a way that has left no visible impression on their DNA.

It makes no sense, and he considers the fact that it makes no sense until his brain feels as fuzzy and soft as the watermelons in the Ralph's discount bin, pacing his laboratory as the sky burns from indigo to taupe to indigo again, frowning at the noxious odor nudging in from the back room of Big Rico's, ignoring the muffled scuffling sounds from the empty building on the laboratory's other side, a warehouse-type structure he thinks is being used as a fencing operation for all the ghost-truck deliveries in the Sand Wastes. When five o'clock rolls around, he turns his radio to face the wall and stuffs his fingers in his ears; Cecil's evening news hour is required listening for all Night Vale residents, but the strange and melodious curl of Cecil's voice is too much of a distraction, digging under Carlos' skin in a way that makes it impossible for him to concentrate on his science.

"You're up," Leanne Hart says several weeks later, in the exact same tone of voice. Carlos hesitates at first, because a sense of déjà vu in Night Vale can mean a sense of déjà vu, or it can mean there's a rift in the space-time continuum, of the type that unleashes plagues of prehistoric creatures, but Leanne is licking buffalo sauce from her fingers tonight, and her deadly acrylic nails are chartreuse instead of pink.

Carlos knocks down a total of seven pins, which is both a pleasant surprise and a personal best. The hooded figures rumble and sway in what he decides to take as approval, and then he shivers from head to toe, a slow chill brushing up his spine as a familiar and painfully goregous voice murmurs, "Bravo, bravo," over the jukebox's ninth loop of _That'll Be the Day_.

Cecil is even more of a distraction in person, with his long nose and perfect chin and near-purple eyes; the tattoos on his arms are red and black today, dark and sudden spirals against the cuffs of his gray striped shirt, and Carlos almost thinks he can hear them humming, like they are just waiting for him to look away so they can change color and shape. He wants to curl his fingers in Cecil's hair, press his lips to the sometimes tattooless skin just below Cecil's left ear. He wonders if Cecil's mouth would taste like the licorice Altoids he keeps at his terminal at the radio station, and that train of thought barrels down the track long enough that Carlos has to physically snap himself back into reality, shaking himself like a wet dog after a bath.

"What are you doing here?" Carlos asks, and if it sounds like an accusation, well. _It is._ Switchblade knives and ghastly, unexplained horticulture-related deaths aside, Carlos had signed up for the Leisure League because Old Woman Josie had bullied Cecil into joining the Knitting Circle, and they are both scheduled for Thursday nights, which Carlos had hoped would lower the chance of an ambush. The only place he can concentrate around Cecil is at the radio station; the flashing lights and creeping dread help Carlos stay focused.

"There was a Secret Police raid at Old Woman Josie's," Cecil explains, darting a sideways glance at the next lane, where five figures in blue cloaks are losing to the Ralph's Baggers by double digits. "It was touch and go there for a moment, but Erika and Erika and Erika managed to escape, and Old Woman Josie is certain my afghan can be saved."

The hooded figures take their turns, and then the City Council's silent and tiny harbinger, and then Leanne Hart, although how she grips her ball with those nails is as much a scientific mystery as anything else in Night Vale. Cecil eventually drifts away, lured to the snack bar with the promise of buffalo wings, and Carlos shuffles home after a disappointing loss to the Target Redshirts with the dull sinus headache that comes from prolonged contact with hooded figures and a bizarre desire to call Cecil and see if listening to his voice would help soothe it away.

He retreats to his laboratory, where he studies the periodic bursts of light over Radon Canyon, tracks the vague and uncertain movements of the shape in Grove Park, and tries to work out why time in Night Vale seems to be slowing down, why the sun has begun setting on an unpredictable schedule and why Desert Bluff is thirteen hours ahead despite only being four miles to the north. He opens one hundred different clocks, each one without gears or cogs or anything else resembling moveable parts, and at five o'clock he locks himself in the bathroom, reminding himself that he came here to make scientific observations, that nearly a year has passed and he is no closer to understanding the disappearing house than he was the day it happened.

Through a combination of bad luck and poor business management, the last Leisure League Thursday of the season falls on the same night as Jeremy Godfrey's fiftieth birthday party, and this meeting of two groups intent on using the same space causes a ridiculous amount of confusion and bruising even _before_ Teddy Williams fiddles with the scoring screens and whips his amateur militia into a seething, bloodthirsty frenzy. Because of their terrible record, the worst this season and in Leisure League history, Carlos' team is obliged to give their lane to Jeremy Godfrey's grandchildren, so Carlos is sitting in the snack bar when the chanting and howling from lane five begins in earnest, nursing a somewhat flat Diet Coke and deeply regretting that second helping of chili fries. He ventures into the underground city for science, because it's another chance to try and explain the unknown, to make some sense of a town that defies every single rule in the book.

Also, he doesn't have anything else to do.

The underground city is tiny and its people are tinier, and while Carlos isn't entirely surprised when they react to him with violence, he doesn't expect it to affect him in any way, since he is considerably larger than anything they have to offer. But the explosions are fierce, for all that they're to scale, and Carlos inhales a good deal more smoke than is good for him, enough that gray and white spots sparkle in front of his eyes, and he loses his footing, squashing what looks like a warehouse district under his shoe as he collapses to the ground. The tiny army stabs him with tiny knives and bites him with tiny teeth, and his nose and mouth fill with the kind of dust that lives underneath bowling alleys. A clock that doesn't actually exist starts ticking in his head, and the last thing he thinks before a regular-sized hand twists in the collar of his shirt is that Cecil will have to report his death over the radio in his painfully gorgeous voice.

"Nakonetz, moyo vremya prishlo!"

When Carlos opens his eyes, the Apache Tracker is dead and Teddy Williams is standing over him and flapping his arms like an owl, but whether that's a diagnosis or a battle cry against the underground city, Carlos doesn't know or care. He picks himself up off the dirty linoleum and walks out to his car, trades his shapeless green bowling shirt for the spare flannel he keeps in the trunk, then fumbles his phone from his pocket and leaves Cecil a message.

The sky above the Arby's is a throbbing, lurid purple, and Carlos smiles. Some things just don't need to be explained.


End file.
